All week long, as part of our ongoingShame Issue,
ELLE.com will be digging into the uncomfortable, unacceptable, and
universally human emotions that keep us down. Hopefully, by addressing
these issues, we can make strides in banishing those feelings of guilt, fear, and not-enoughness. Here's to just letting. It. Go.

With the ability to target not just powerful institutions and public figures, but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive (think Justine Sacco, Lindsey Stone, Adria Richards), Twitter has become a dangerous place—where context is hard and rage is always too easy—for misunderstood opinions or misconstrued jokes. And when a woman is shamed online, it doesn't take long for her entire womanhood to be mocked and vilified, dismantled piece-by-piece with hateful and often sexually violent threats.

"Women always have it worse than men," explained Jon Ronson during his TED Talk last month titled What Happens When Online Shaming Spirals Out of Control. "When a man gets shamed, it's going to be: 'I'm going to get you fired.' When a women gets shamed, it's: 'I'm going to get you fired, and raped, and we'll cut out your uterus,'" he said.

Though Ronson, the author of So You've Just Been Publicly Shamed, admits he slightly regrets delivering this particular line onstage because "there has been some really terrible attacks on men lately that feel just as bad [as those directed at women]" (think Tim Hunt, Matt Taylor, and Ariel Ronis, an Israeli civil servant who committed suicide in May after Facebook accusations of racism), he continues to stand behind his belief that the offensive and often knee-jerk outrage directed at women on the Internet lays bare an increasing undercurrent of pervasive and hidden misogyny.

"There is a lot of misogyny in the world, and men often lash out [at women] in a very misogynistic way on Twitter," Ronson explains. "I do think in many ways women have it worse than men, because the range of threats against them is way worse; they are more severe and violent in language."

Take the case of Adria Richards, where so-called men's rights activists and trolls used Twitter and Facebook to send her death threats—including a photograph of a beheaded woman with duct tape over her mouth—after she tweeted an image of two men making "dongle jokes" at a California tech conference in 2013 to her 9,209 followers. "Not cool. Jokes about . . . 'big' dongles right behind me," she captioned the image.

Richards considered their joke to be "emblematic of the gender imbalance that plagues the tech industry and the toxic, male-dominated corporate culture that arises from it," explains Ronson, and the men in question were later fired. Soon after, Richards' employer's website was held ransom by hackers who said they would stop only if Richards was fired—which she was, publicly, later that day. After receiving hundreds of violent threats on Twitter, one of which revealed her address, Richards left her home fearing for her life and slept on friends' couches for the remainder of the year. "I cried a lot during this time, journaled, and escaped by watching movies," she told Ronson in an interview for The New York Times. "I was thrown under the bus. I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone."

For Justine Sacco, the online shaming she endured was "completely cataclysmic" says Ronson, adding that the online punishment was "massively disproportionate to her crime. And no one defended her." In what was later revealed to be an attempted critique of white privilege, Sacco infamously sent a sarcastic tweet to her 170 followers in December 2013: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!". Gawker's senior writer Sam Biddle then retweeted it to his 15,000 followers (but later apologized for doing so), and in an instant Sacco was "yanked violently out of the context of her small social circle," explains Ronson in a piece for The New York Times Magazine. Immediately, hundreds of thousands of empathetic and self-righteous people began sending Sacco death and rape threats, trying to "get" her for the "racist" joke. "There is nothing brave about that," says Ronson. "And these kinds of violent threats, that's something men don't really receive, nor do they really understand the fear of that."

Patrick Blanchfield, a Woodruff Scholar in comparative literature at Emory University, described the abuse Sacco endured as "palpable misogyny" in an opinion piece for The Washington Post. But he believes there are other women who have it "far worse," almost on a daily basis. For instance, feminist writers and activists like Jessica Valenti face "constant" online attacks of shaming, he argues, while other writers, like Jaclyn Munson and Lauren Bruce, were driven to retire from the Internet entirely. "The vulnerability of women of color is even more intense," Blanchfield writes. "Prominent scholars like Anthea Butler of the University of Pennsylvania face onslaughts of racist harassment just for speaking their minds. Outside of academia, activists like Jamia Wilson are targets of uniquely brutal and racially tinged abuse, and social critics like Feminista Jones must put up with attacks on a daily basis."

"The vulnerability of women of color is even more intense."

Emily Gould is one writer who knows this feeling well. After Jimmy Kimmel accused the former Gawker editor of "irresponsible journalism" during an episode of Larry King Live in 2007 (pointing to the website's "celebrity stalker map" on which Kimmel himself was spotted, reportedly while drunk), Gould said she was shamed into staying inside her apartment after receiving scores of viscous messages. Recalling the incident in The New York Times Magazine a year later, Gould wrote: "Back at home, after wiping off the TV makeup, I logged into my Gawker e-mail account and found my in-box flooded. I scrolled through the first of what would eventually be hundreds—and then, as the clip of my appearance was dissected on other blogs over the course of the next few days, thousands—of angry e-mail messages."

Eight years later and the experience still haunts her. Gould explained on her Genius Wikipedia page in May that the clip will occasionally resurface on the front page of Reddit ("Like, the peat bog of the internet will cough it up every once in a while," she writes), and she will again become the target of abusive tweets like, "You stupid cunt! You have no right to ruin Jimmy Kimmel's life." Gould doesn't hold misogyny entirely accountable, however. Instead, she believes the Internet is an enabler for pitting women against women.

After Ronson asked Gould why she thinks "these things become so much more outsized for women than they do for men?", she says she replied "without thinking too hard": "Because women and men hate women, whereas only really men will bother to attack other men like this." She goes on to explain that "women hate themselves so all those things sort of conspire to make young women who seem like they don't know what the fuck they are talking about especially vulnerable. People are like, 'We have to take her down.'"

"Women and men hate women, whereas only really men will bother to attack other men like this."

In this way, Twitter, Ronson says, has become the opposite of a democracy. Rather, it has turned into an oversized mutual approval machine where it is all too easy and thrilling to "take down" a stranger online. Though one could argue that the social media platform bears some responsibility in the high stakes of online shaming, Ronson has learned firsthand not to rely on the company. "Twitter couldn't give a fuck what happens on Twitter," he says, before adding that "the best thing we can do if you see someone being abused, if you see a woman getting death threats or rape threats, being trolled with misogynistic abuse, then speak up. If you see anyone, a man or a woman, on the end of some ambiguous unfair shaming, speak up."

Ronson believes society is making slow progress, however and uses the case of Jennifer Kim, a member of the Washington National Opera Orchestra who survived the Amtrack train crash in Pennsylvania earlier this year, as an "interesting" example of how a "horrendous shaming against a woman had a more positive outcome." Kim became the subject of hateful abuse after sending what was perceived by many as an incentive tweet for Amtrack rescue workers to retrieve her violin from the train's second car.

"Straight away there was a fury of, 'You entitled cunt, if you think they should save your violin when they're tending to the dead and dying you're just a privileged cunt,'" recalls Ronson. "Thousands of people who hadn't just been in a train crash were accusing a woman who had just been in a train crash of being privileged and entitled. That's ridiculous. Not only was she accused of misusing her privilege, but she was being given violent, misogynist abuse."

But then something different happened. Unlike Sacco, people began defending Kim. "They were tweeting, 'What the hell are you doing? This women has just been in a train crash,'" says Ronson. "There was a babble of voices, some in favor of her, some against. And I thought, that was real progress, because with Justine there was no-one standing up for her. People were too scared to stand up for her for fear that they'd be called privileged too. But it would have made it much less damaging for her," he says. "Really, the most important thing we can do is remember what democracy is, which is a babble of voices. It's not everyone shutting the hell up because they're scared it's going to happen to them next."